I took the opportunity to visit Bratislava from Vienna, and add another country, since it was only a one hour train ride. I picked Friday – the fifth day of our six-day trip – to visit Bratislava, because we would have had some time to hit the highlights of Vienna by then, and when I first considered the timing, it was meant to be raining in Vienna, but dry in Bratislava. As it transpired, later in the week, the weather forecast had changed, and it was also going to be raining in Bratislava.

Steph recommended the Slovak Pub, so we visited it, almost the first thing, with a quick stop by the Blue Church. We travelled by tram and bus, which the kids were quite liked. I had the potato dumplings with soft sheep’s cheese and bacon (Bryndzové halušky) as recommended by Steph, which was yummy.

Then we did some sight seeing around the Old Town (St Michael’s Gate, Main Square / Hlavné námestie, St Martin’s cathedral, Bratislava Castle, and went bronze statue hunting). Unfortunately, it was a grey and rainy day, which made it cold, wet and miserable to trudge around from place to place. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was also rainy in Vienna, and I wanted to have a second meal at the Slovak Pub, I might have turned around and headed straight home after a quick post-lunch walk around Old Town.

Instead, we made our way up to Bratislava Castle to ‘kill time’ in the relative warmth, and then had a hot chocolate at Starbucks and went bronze statue-hunting, until around 17:30-18:00, when I felt I could just about justify having an early dinner, despite still being relatively full from lunch.

All of us had some variant of dumplings for dinner – Baby F had potato dumplings with sausages, Big Boy O had three big meat-filled dumplings, and I had cheese-filled pierogi topped with bacon.

Then we took a tram and bus back to Bratislava-Petržalka, and caught the train back to Wien Hauptbahnhof.